The Climate-Wrecking Industry

David Middleton has been a proud member of the Climate-Wrecking Industry since 1981.

From the flamingly left-wing The Nation…

The Climate-Wrecking Industry… and How to Beat It

Insisting that we’re all responsible for global warming lets the biggest corporate polluters off the hook.

By Jason Mark YESTERDAY 6:00 AM

Among climate activists, the scene is remembered with a mix of embarrassment and scorn: at the end of his 2006 Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore, having just detailed the existential threat posed by global climate change, offered the audience a way to take action: Change your light bulbs. Gore’s prescription seemed completely incommensurate with the scale of the problem. The future of the human race, as well as millions of other species, is hanging in the balance—better get to the hardware store for some compact fluorescents.

Yet even today, at this late hour, the fight against global warming is bedeviled by public bewilderment.

[…]

According to peer-reviewed studies by Richard Heede and the Climate Accountability Institute, the business practices of just 90 fossil-fuel companies are responsible for two-thirds of the observed increases in global surface temperatures between 1751 and 2010.

[…]

Drawing on this and other research, The Nation has assembled a list of the “Worst of the Worst” in the climate-wrecking industry. (See our list on the opposite page.) Earning a dishonorable mention is the Republican Party, which continues to drink the Kool-Aid of climate denial and to obstruct even the most modest measures to protect the climate. Also on the list is the US Chamber of Commerce, which has spearheaded much of the opposition from business groups as a whole.

Dude! This is the Internet, Al Gore’s invention… There is no “opposite page.”

Back to the delusional rant…

One weakness of campaigning directly against the climate wreckers is that it’s simply unrealistic to expect a corporation to abandon the very reason for its existence. A lasting and equitable solution to climate change would put the fossil-fuel industry out of business, since these companies aren’t going to walk away from their (for now) still-profitable enterprises.

Recognizing that problem, organizers have sought to outflank the companies by targeting their bankers.

[…]

Yet while they’ve declined to finance specific projects, these banks are still extending loans to the carbon polluters’ various holding companies. And even their baby steps toward climate responsibility have generated blowback. HSBC has been quietly blackballed by the fossil-fuel industry, which has had little difficulty finding other lenders (most notably JPMorgan Chase) to fill the gap. For now, at least, the banks need fossil-fuel companies as much as these companies need the banks.

Destroying the climate, in short, remains a winning business proposition.

Dude!

Now for the really delusional bit:

Among activists, a consensus is emerging that legal action may prove the best way to bring the climate wreckers to account.

Dude! Maybe you haven’t been keeping up with other left-wing rags…

ADAM ROGERS SCIENCE 07.20.18

TURNS OUT CITIES CAN’T SUE OIL COMPANIES FOR CLIMATE CHANGE

YOU CAN’T SUE your way to a solution for global warming. So says the judge.

On Thursday, Judge John Keenan of New York’s Southern District dismissed the City of New York’s lawsuit against the international oil and gas companies BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell. Facing billions of dollars in climate change-related damage in the coming years, New York was hoping to extract some money from the transnational companies that extract the oil that people burn for energy—raising the planet’s temperature, exacerbating storms, melting polar ice and elevating sea levels, worsening wildfires, extending droughts, and allowing diseases to spread farther and faster.

But no. The problem isn’t the science; it’s settled. The problem is the law. Even though attorneys for the city tried to argue that their complaint was covered by federal common law and the courts, Judge Keenan found otherwise—that in the end they were suing over emissions, and so the Clean Air Act took over. Which is to say, what New York wanted to do in a lawsuit is covered by the regulatory powers of the president and Congress. “Climate change is a fact of life, as is not contested by Defendants,” Keenan writes. “But the serious problems caused thereby are not for the judiciary to ameliorate. Global warming and solutions thereto must be addressed by the two other branches of government.”

Cities around the country have been filing lawsuits, hoping to get money from oil companies to pay for things like seawalls and infrastructure improvements—part of a strategy that’s been developing for decades. Oil companies have continued to market and lobby for lighter regulation on a product that made life harder on the only planet anyone knows about with life on it, while the US government moved slowly, if at all, toward remaking the country’s energy production and carbon emissions. If regulation and the law won’t help, the theory goes, you turn to the courts.

That’s not going well. Keenan’s decision comes not even a month after a similar defeat 3,000 miles away in June to a lawsuit filed by San Francisco and Oakland against the same oil companies. That case had the same outcome, this time from Judge William Alsup of the Northern District1 of California: “Although the scope of plaintiffs’ claims is determined by federal law, there are sound reasons why regulation of the worldwide problem of global warming should be determined by our political branches, not by our judiciary,” he writes. “The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case.”

The climate wreckers do, in fact, appear to be shaken by the lawsuits. In a procedural counterattack, ExxonMobil has petitioned a Texas judge to allow it to depose attorneys and local officials from the California communities suing the company.

Dude! That’s how lawsuits work. You get to depose the other side. If ExxonMobil hadn’t petitioned for depositions, it would have been evidence that they were so shaken, that their attorneys forgot how to be lawyers.

Whitehouse (a truly whacked out Senator from the most insignificant State in the nation) and Carlson (a professor at the UCLA School of Law), among others, think the lawsuits could open the way for a kind of grand bargain on climate change: In exchange for helping to pass a law mandating an economy-wide tax on carbon, the major polluters would receive immunity from lawsuits. But such a deal would have to come with financial accountability for the climate wreckers’ misdeeds—what Whitehouse called a “massive climate-relief fund” modeled on the tobacco settlement and BP’s settlement for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. “They don’t get to walk away scot-free,” Whitehouse said.

Of course, for that to happen, climate-action champions would have to gain control of Congress. Which means that climate activists, like the rest of the progressive movement, need to do everything they can to ensure that Congress changes hands.

That’s the sort of transformation that will require far more work—and many more people—than changing a light bulb.

Jason Mark is the editor in chief of Sierra magazine and the author of Satellites in the High Country: Searching for the Wild in the Age of Man.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senators Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) today led a broad bipartisan group of senators in reintroducing legislation to extend and expand a key tax credit to encourage technological innovation that would reduce carbon emissions, and recognize the need for a diverse energy mix around the world for years to come.

The 45Q tax credit, which the bill would extend, supports maintaining a place in our energy mix for existing resources like coal and natural gas by encouraging development and use of carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technologies and processes—while also spurring adoption of low-carbon technologies to transform carbon pollution into useable products. Heitkamp and Whitehouse first introduced the bill last July. Since then, they have worked with Capito to build out bipartisan support among more progressive Democratic senators and more conservative Republican senators. A wide cross-section of coal companies, utilities, environmental groups, and labor organizations also support the bill, reinforcing a willingness from all sides to come together and seek bipartisan solutions.

[…]

“Everyone agrees carbon pollution is bad, but under the current rules new technologies to reduce carbon can’t gain a foothold in the market,” said Whitehouse. “This bipartisan bill will help level the field for new technologies, allowing facilities that prevent emissions to compete with older, dirtier plants. In the process, we’ll clear a path for promising businesses in Rhode Island and around the country that turn carbon pollution into useful products. That’s a win-win.”